{"id":129370,"date":"2020-02-27T08:30:09","date_gmt":"2020-02-27T16:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=129370"},"modified":"2020-02-27T12:24:53","modified_gmt":"2020-02-27T20:24:53","slug":"the-sum-of-small-things-a-theory-of-the-aspirational-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=129370","title":{"rendered":"The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett wrote in 2017<\/a>: <\/p>\n

* In the 1920s, Muriel Bristol attended a summer\u2019s afternoon tea party in Cambridge, UK. A number of professors and their spouses were also in attendance. On this particular occasion, the host poured Bristol a cup of tea and poured in the milk thereafter. Bristol protested, explaining that she liked her \u201cmilk in first,\u201d as the tea tasted better that way. Despite skeptical resistance from those in attendance, Bristol insisted she could tell the difference. Ronald Alymer Fischer, one of those present, who would later go on to become \u201cSir Fischer\u201d and the godfather of modern empirical statistics with his famous book The Design of Experiments, had an idea. Surely, if eight cups of tea were poured, four with \u201cmilk in first\u201d and the other four with tea in first, and the lady identified them correctly then she would be proven right (her chances of merely guessing by chance would be 1 in 70). Fischer, like everyone else present, believed Bristol would likely fail the test. In other words, they believed Bristol\u2019s belief in her tea acumen was embedded in a false sense of aesthetics and taste rather than reality. As it turns out, Bristol correctly determined the order of tea and milk in each of the eight cups. <\/p>\n

Fischer\u2019s experiment, which went on to transform statistics and modern science (it became the foundation for testing the \u201cnull hypothesis\u201d), 1 would not have been possible if not for the embedded status and its accompanying aesthetics in how one drinks one\u2019s tea. Milk in first or last has been a sign of status since the Victorian era, as the choice of one or the other implies one\u2019s class position. In fact, the difference boils down to the materials from which one\u2019s dishware is made. <\/p>\n

In the Victorian era, materials used to make lesser-quality teacups would often crack if hot tea were poured into them. Pouring milk in first mitigated the chances of cracking one\u2019s cup. However, those with money could afford the fine china that could withstand the heat of tea, thus milk in later was a signal of one\u2019s elevated economic position. 2 Even when the order of milk and tea was primarily a practical matter, it revealed class more than taste. After all, those owning fine china would put the milk in last to demonstrate this luxury. As the butler in the famous British drama of the same time period, Upstairs, Downstairs, remarked, \u201cThose of us downstairs put the milk in first, while those upstairs put the milk in last.\u201d <\/p>\n

Even in more contemporary times, when the quality of almost all dishware is strong enough to withstand hot tea, milk in first remained a sign of social class. The twentieth-century English novelist, Nancy Mitford, employed the term \u201cM.I.F.\u201d to describe the lower classes, and the turn of phrase is still used satirically in popular media to describe the working classes or those without refined social skills. Today, the famous English tea purveyor Fortnum & Mason characterizes the choice as a \u201cthorny question,\u201d devoting an entire essay on its website to how to drink tea. How did such a prosaic choice of action, so subtle and ostensibly innocuous, become an amplified sign of class? Throughout time, matters of seeming practicality have evolved into symbols of status. In Victorian England, the displaying of medicines in the parlor was a sign that one could afford to see a doctor and buy medicine. In pre-Revolutionary Paris, the use of candles was rare and expensive, yet even when access to light (and later electricity) became more democratized, the lighting of candles at dinnertime remained a sign of taste and breeding. 3 The same is true for the use of cloth napkins when paper napkins would do (and eliminate the hassle of laundering). Everything we do has social meaning. <\/p>\n

* The increase in online shopping has also had a profound impact on consumer access to coveted brands. <\/p>\n

* Globalization, mass marketing, mass production, and knockoffs have created a conspicuous consumption profile for many more people. This deluge of material goods would suggest that the barriers to entry into upper-class conspicuous consumption have been all but eradicated. The \u201cstuff\u201d once associated with a wealthy lifestyle\u2014 cars, multiple handbags, closets full of clothes\u2014 is seemingly accessible to mainstream society. At first blush, conspicuous consumption has been democratized. <\/p>\n

* the upper class now maintains its exclusivity by attaining limited edition versions of goods. Whether artisanal cheeses or limited vintages of wine or Ferraris\u2014 regardless of the price point\u2014 the item in question accrues status by virtue of simply being scarce rather than merely expensive. In Europe, where manufacturers are having trouble selling mass-market $ 15,000 cars, Ferraris, starting at $ 275,000 are going like gangbusters. <\/p>\n

* Today abundance of leisure no longer indicates higher status. <\/p>\n

* The choices to practice yoga, take kids to hockey rather than soccer, drink almond milk instead of regular milk, and reuse grocery bags every week are all signifiers of position that are not inherently more expensive than their alternatives but thought to be more informed. By turn, these behaviors become markers of status. <\/p>\n

* Over the past several decades, there has been an increase in three important macro trends in American spending behavior. First, the rich and upper middle class\u2014 that is, those in the top 1% and those in the top 5% and 10% income brackets\u2014 spend less as a percentage of their expenditures on conspicuous consumption relative to what the US average spends on the same goods, while the middle class\u2014 the 40th\u2013 60th percentiles\u2014 spends more. Second, as a share of their expenditures, the middle class is spending more on conspicuous consumption relative to their income while the wealthy (and the very poor) are spending less. Third, conspicuous consumption among the rich has been replaced by \u201cinconspicuous consumption\u201d\u2014 spending on nonvisible, highly expensive goods and services that give people more time and, in the long term, shape life chances. These include education, health care, child care, and labor-intensive services like nannies, gardeners, and housekeepers. <\/p>\n

* For example, in 1996, we devoted 14.2% of our total expenditures to food; in 2014, our total expenditure in this category was 15%. 5 Alcohol is similarly constant, hovering at just less than 1% of total expenditures, as is tobacco, which remains static (surprisingly so, given the huge anti-smoking campaigns of the past 15\u2013 20 years). We spend the same on personal insurance and pensions (roughly 11% of total expenditures), and housing (slightly more than 30%). <\/p>\n

* In a few instances, we spend notably less: apparel (from 4.1% of total expenditures in 1996 to 2.2% in 2014) and transportation (19.7% in 1996 and 16.9% in 2014), both of which reflect globalization\u2019s cheaper cars and cheaper clothes. There are two categories where we spend more: health care (up from 5.1% to 8.1%) and education (up from 1.4% to 2.1%). <\/p>\n

* while education expenditures have increased 60% since 1996, the top 1%, 5%, and 10% income fractiles have increased their share of education expenditures by almost 300% during this same time period. Conversely, education expenditure shares have remained almost flat for the other groups, which suggests that top groups drove the uptick in education spending. <\/p>\n

* The children who benefit from increased investment in education go on to obtain better jobs, higher incomes, and a better future for their families. Those who can afford it devote more to their pensions and insurance, have a better retirement (and in fact, can retire), better medical care, and better quality of life. <\/p>\n

* A notable expenditure item for lower income families is funerals. Since 1996, low-income families consistently rank as the highest spenders on funerals relative to their total expenditures, while the rich spend less than the national average on them for most of the years studied. In 2014, the top 1% spent significantly less on funerals than everyone else even in absolute dollars…<\/p>\n

* Paul Johnson remarked that funerals were an important display of status among the working class of Edwardian and Victorian England, while they were shunned by the bourgeois (who would have had myriad alternative outlets to display status). In comparison to the rich, who host and attend museum galas, charity events, and endless dinner parties, the poor are relatively limited in their avenues to engage in conspicuous consumption. <\/p>\n

* Controlling for all other factors and just looking at the effect of race, Charles and his colleagues find that blacks and Hispanics spend more of their income on conspicuous consumption than whites within the same income and education groups.<\/p>\n

* Our results show that Hispanics are the most likely to spend on conspicuous consumption: 4.4% more than non-Hispanic whites, 15% more than blacks, and almost 20% more than Asians, though next to Asians, Hispanics are the least likely to spend on inconspicuous consumption. Non-Hispanic whites are the biggest spenders on inconspicuous consumption, followed by blacks. Controlling for all other factors, Asians spend the least on both conspicuous and inconspicuous consumption.<\/p>\n

* In the beginning, Essie Weingarten just liked nail polish colors. In 1981, Ms. Weingarten packed up her bags and displayed her initial 12 nail polish colors at a trade show in Las Vegas. In her collection she had, as she explained, \u201ca true red, a blue red, a pink red and an orange red,\u201d along with the translucent pink and white tones that made her famous. Essie was the first in the business to push the sheer colors, of which Ballet Slippers has become the iconic shade along with Vanity Fairest (Essie #505), Baby\u2019s Breath (# 5), Sugar Daddy (# 473), and Mademoiselle (# 384). As Essie explained, \u201cI personally loved the look and nobody was doing it.\u201d In 1989, Queen Elizabeth\u2019s hairdresser sent a note to Essie requesting Ballet Slippers, Essie #162. As Essie recalls, \u201cAbout two years after it came out, I received a letter from the Queen\u2019s hairdresser [with the request] complete with Royal seal. I thought, \u2018I\u2019ve arrived.\u2019\u201d In the decades since, Ballet Slippers and its sheer sisters have reigned supreme as the de rigueur nail polish colors for a particular group of women within Beverly Hills, New York\u2019s Upper East Side, and London\u2019s Kensington. Given the cult following by this aesthetically conscious elite group of women, and the Queen of England no less, surely there must be something special about Ballet Slippers\u2014 iridescent sparkles, unique mineral composition, or some attribute that would make its cult following so obvious. Yet, once applied, the color hardly screamed \u201cnotice me\u201d or \u201cI\u2019ve just had a manicure.\u201d One coat leaves nails a slight blush, two coats creates an opaque white with hints of pink. Rather, this delicate color, almost childlike, merely signals subtly that a woman grooms herself. <\/p>\n

* Historically, professional manicures were very much relegated to high society and the affluent. \u201cGetting a manicure before the 1980s was really special,\u201d Essie explained. \u201cBefore then, it was an outrage [to spend money on a manicure].\u201d Then things changed. Starting in the 1980s, with the increased availability of low-wage service workers (located disproportionately in major cities), the price of manicures decreased such that average women were able to go to the salon. Now women can pop into a salon and have their nails done for $ 15. Thus, a former habit of high society was easily translated by the masses. <\/p>\n

* Thus social class is not produced through consumption (you can\u2019t \u201cbuy\u201d your way automatically into the upper class) but rather it is attained through the adoption of values and aesthetics and the ability to decipher symbols and signs beyond materialism. <\/p>\n

* The key to most all inconspicuous consumption is that it is nonvisible except to those in the know, and is difficult to emulate without tacit information or a significant amount of money. Inconspicuous consumption is the source of the new class divide. <\/p>\n

* Acquiring manners and demonstrating them took time and was often possible only for those who led a life of leisure, exemplifying two important qualities of Veblen\u2019s upper class. Language has also always been a means to show social position\u2014 like manners, it takes time to acquire and practice particular word choices and turns of phrase. To quote the late social critic Paul Fussell, \u201cRegardless of the money you\u2019ve inherited \u2026 the place you live, the way you look \u2026 the time you eat dinner, the stuff you buy from mail-order catalogs \u2026 your social class is still most clearly visible when you say things.\u201d 6 Fussell goes on to discuss the \u201cpseudoelegant style\u201d of the middle class: their discomfort in calling a toilet a toilet (rather, it is a restroom\/ lavatory\/ powder room), a drunk a drunk (he is someone \u201cwith alcohol problems\u201d), or to comfortably use swear words or the word \u201cdeath\u201d (rather, it is \u201cpassing away\u201d or \u201ctaken to Jesus\u201d). Conversely, they are self-conscious using words that the upper classes use with reckless abandon: \u201cdivine,\u201d \u201coutstanding,\u201d \u201csuper,\u201d \u201ctedious,\u201d \u201ctiresome.\u201d In their place, the middle class uses those umbrella words of banality: \u201cnice\u201d and \u201cboring.\u201d <\/p>\n

* \u201cCulture is a resource used by elites to recognize one another and distribute opportunities on the basis of the display of appropriate attributes.\u201d <\/p>\n

* Similarly, saying one went to a \u201csmall school in Cambridge\u201d when everyone knows you mean Harvard suggests the downplaying of something that is actually prized and rare, just like the option to have dinner in the dining room or the kitchen. A household\u2019s rule of taking one\u2019s shoes off when entering suggests too much regard and preciousness for the house (nouveau), while the aspirational class wouldn\u2019t dare imply their house was worthy of such care (even if it actually is). <\/p>\n

* If one is not brought up within an elite habitus, one remains an outsider. This explains why we see the true upper class of Britain poor as paupers but status rich, and why Tony Soprano, with his big New Jersey suburban house, would never be invited to attend a Met gala or to serve on the board of the New York Public Library. <\/p>\n

* Breast-feeding [is] the twenty-first century signifier of what motherhood ought to be… Ask Corky Harvey, the founder of the LA\u2013 based breast-feeding and baby boutique The Pump Station. With outposts in Santa Monica, Hollywood, and throughout the city, Harvey\u2019s little boutiques garner an almost cult-like following. Her stores offer everything from high-end newborn onesies to CPR classes to breast-feeding classes and consultations, replete with breast pump rentals and sales (thus the name of the store). A new mom can find anything she needs for her baby. Before the average upper-middle-class Angelino mother gets pregnant, she likely doesn\u2019t know what The Pump Station is; thereafter it almost becomes a rite of passage to attend classes and get one\u2019s Medela breast pump \u201cserviced.\u201d Yet, as Harvey herself explained, \u201cWe would never survive in rural Mississippi or NE Pennsylvania,\u201d where the notion of a breastfeeding boutique would be hilariously weird. <\/p>\n

* The biggest purchaser of formula in the nation is the US government, which channels much of it through Women Infants and Children (WIC), the federal assistance program for low-income pregnant women and mothers. As Harvey put it, \u201cWhy wouldn\u2019t you take it for free if you\u2019re poor? Medicine plays a role [by not advocating heavily enough with mothers]. For instance, in cultures like low income African Americans in Atlanta Georgia nobody breast-feeds and if you do you\u2019re a fool \u2026 As my son, who is a physician in Atlanta, explained to me, \u2018Mom, it isn\u2019t even discussed here.\u2019\u201d The research suggests that mothers who are eligible for WIC (and use it) are less likely to breast-feed than mothers who are not. <\/p>\n

* Another pediatrician, who worked at a community clinic, explained to me that, in the past, in some populations, the women were given a shot of Depo (a birth control medicine) almost immediately after birth. <\/p>\n

* Despite the health imperative, breast-feeding at 6 and 12 months remains a rarefied practice. It is mainly prevalent in particular cultural and class groups\u2014 women with higher education levels who learn about the benefits of breast-feeding and women of higher income groups who can afford the insurance to deliver in baby-friendly hospitals with round-the-clock nurses and lactation consultants providing breastfeeding classes, expensive and efficient breast pumps, and help throughout the mother\u2019s entire stay. <\/p>\n

* To the rest of the world, the battles on the New York Times opinion pages about the moral imperative of breast-feeding may seem like aspirational class navel gazing\u2014 it reflects a debate completely detached from most mothers\u2019 lives, and indeed it is. The Mommy Wars\u2014 to breastfeed or not, the stay-at-home versus the working mother face-off, C-sections, and home births\u2014 are debates for a particularly privileged set of women. <\/p>\n

* if one has the time and money to attend cardio barre classes several times a week, it does start to show. As the New York Observer less than delicately put it, women who attend these classes do look physically different from their non\u2013 barre workout class attendees. So merely by picking up coffee, stopping at the grocery store, or going out to dinner, those who attend classes at Pop Physique, Physique 57, The Bar Method, or any permutation of cardio barre class, reveal their conspicuous leisure by simply living their lives. And if one is ever concerned that the world is unaware of the hard work of such conspicuous leisure, there is always the \u201chealthy selfie,\u201d which is a photo taken post-workout that can be instantly posted to Facebook or Instagram, or one\u2019s blog. <\/p>\n

* Consider the maelstrom of aspirational class parenting: the elite, private preschool. Tuition runs $ 10,000\u2013 $ 40,000 a year and wait-lists start before a child is even born. Forty-five-year-old dads race out of work to pick up their kids by 5 pm (only to work into the wee hours after bedtime). Some dads work in the broadly drawn \u201ccreative class,\u201d and thus their flexible hours allow them to join their children for lunch. Stay-at-home moms, some with Ivy League graduate degrees, are shopping for organic vegetables and organizing play dates and music lessons while their children are at school. <\/p>\n

* Where Starbucks made its fortune in bringing luxury to the masses, Intelligentsia makes its (smaller) fortune proclaiming its rarity. <\/p>\n

* People who shop at Whole Foods are not oblivious to its contradictions of capitalism. Affectionately called Whole Paycheck, the grocery store beams purity, goodwill, and a return to nature\u2014 but all at a shocking price tag that is unaffordable for most of society. Whole Foods shoppers know that they can get organic tomatoes for half the cost at Trader Joe\u2019s, or even the local chain, but the grocery store creates an entire shopping experience that for many is worth the price. Even people who probably don\u2019t earn the income to afford luxury food (those same unemployed playwrights and artists buying $ 5 cups of coffee) end up in the store\u2019s deli buying sweet summer kale salad for $ 11.99 a pound. <\/p>\n

* Farmers\u2019 markets perhaps most closely embody the merging of localism and conspicuous production and successfully exist in the heart of distinctly non-agrarian cities across the United States. Any weekend afternoon in Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, or Notting Hill offers half a dozen such gatherings of farm-fresh produce heralding from pastures and fields located in the city\u2019s hinterlands.<\/p>\n

* Indeed, from an economies-of-scale or -scope perspective, the farmers\u2019 market makes no sense\u2014 there aren\u2019t significant advantages for the farmer or the consumers, who would otherwise be Whole Foods customers perhaps avoiding long lines and the parking lot. People don\u2019t go to farmers\u2019 markets for deals\u2014 most of the fruit and vegetables are the same price as in upscale grocery stores\u2014 nor do they go to get diversity of produce. <\/p>\n

* The problem is that cheap goods simply can\u2019t be made in America. …consumers are taking notice of globalization\u2019s discontents and slowly pushing back. Globalization may have brought $ 5 t-shirts but increasingly, consumers are willing to pay more to ensure that workers are well cared for. <\/p>\n

* Consumption may define the urban experience generally, but Los Angeles and San Francisco, despite both being Californian cities, couldn\u2019t be more different from one another, not just in the idiosyncrasies of their micro-scenes of glamour or grit, but also on a macro level. These cities are of course both great meccas of urbanity and all of its trappings\u2014 luxury coffee, great restaurants, museums, and big sports stadiums. But if you confused a San Franciscan with an Angelino, the former would be deeply insulted, priding himself on a bohemian intellectualism that the latter surely lacks. Angelinos find New Yorkers neurotic, New Yorkers find Chicagoans too Midwestern, and so forth. Herein lies a simple but important point about cities and their consumption: As New York is known for finance and fashion, San Francisco for technology, Detroit for automobiles, and Los Angeles for film and video games, the cities\u2019 consumption options are equally important in underpinning their identities. <\/p>\n

* Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and San Francisco are home to the biggest fruit and vegetable consumers….Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore rank as the lowest consumers… Philadelphia cheesesteak sandwiches may not be a daily habit but they do reflect a culture that is more meat than kale. Candy, chewing gum, cola, and artificial sweeteners are popular in the Midwest but for the most part are avoided in coastal cities. Northeast cities consistently spend less than the national average by a significant amount. In 2010, for example, New Yorkers spent about half as much as most cities spend on artificial sweeteners and 55% less on candy and chewing gum. Non-metro areas consume a lot of artificial sweeteners, cola, fats, oils, and fresh milk and cream\u2014 exactly the items that city dwellers don\u2019t buy. They also buy more frozen and canned vegetables and fruit rather than fresh. These are items that are, across the board, rarely bought in cities. <\/p>\n

* urban dwellers have something in common when it comes to nonalcoholic beer, dining out, and drinking wine. They consume none of the country\u2019s nonalcoholic beer (and I mean none of it) and universally spend more money on dining out and drinking wine\u2014 social activities that go hand in hand. San Francisco, San Diego, New York, and Boston have been known to spend more than twice as much on wine, in total expenditure, than the national average. And for those cities that are less likely to drink wine\u2014 Philadelphia and Detroit\u2014 they make up for it in beer and cocktails. Generally, beer is less of an urban drink than wine or cocktails, although Boston and Minneapolis are overachievers in all areas of alcoholic consumption. Only Miami is a teetotaler across the board, spending about 40% less than the rest of the country on alcoholic beverages. <\/p>\n

* Housekeeping services are also a remarkably urban phenomenon, with New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco spending almost double the rest of the country (whereas housekeeping supplies is a disproportionately non-metro purchase).<\/p>\n

* No one really hosted dinner parties or had people over for coffee. People did everything outside of their home in the caf\u00e9s and bars located on all corners of the city. Working on my first book, I remember interviewing Ingrid Sichy, editor of Interview magazine at the time, and she said the same thing, unprompted by me\u2014 that the city was one\u2019s dining room, living room, and extended home\u2014 rather than the apartment, which is just where we went to sleep at night. Sichy, friend of Andy Warhol, glamorous cultural icon on the New York City scene, was, just like the rest of us, merely paying rent to actually live and be entertained in the city at large. Thus it is no surprise at all to see that many urban households seem to have similar priorities. Across all cities, urbanites reveal remarkably less expenditure share than the national average on household textiles, bathroom and bedroom linens, furniture, and silver serving pieces\u2014 all the trappings of the tidy, beautifully maintained home.<\/p>\n

* Urban folks spend their money on things outside of the material goods of the home. They may outsource labor to make their home lives easier, but they are not spending money on the material aspects of their homes. This decision is in part because they eat and entertain outside the home. It may also be due to the transient nature of many people\u2019s urban experience\u2014 people live in cities for some parts of their lives, then they get married, have kids, and move to the suburbs, which is when they start to care about sofas and bathroom towels. Yet, another important aspect of this pattern is that urbanites spend so much time outside of their homes that their materialism is devoted to their own external physical appearance, rather than that of their internal world, thus encapsulating Georg Simmel\u2019s early-twentieth-century observation of eccentric urbanites who use clothing as a quick signal of identity and individuality. <\/p>\n

* As ostentatious as they are in some respects, there is a subtlety to many city dwellers\u2019 beauty habits. Makeup rarely looks obvious, manicures are often clear or a pale pink. The exceptions to this trend are Houston and Dallas (and Seattle, of all places), where there is more of an inclination to spend on beauty products, including wigs and hairpieces. <\/p>\n

* I was eating in a Mexican restaurant in Pasadena with my friend Eric (an avid Grindr user, if only in the passive, trolling sense). While I was eating tacos, he was doing a Grindr search; it turned out that a potential mate was at a table a mere 10 feet away, as indicated by the location button on his app flashing incessantly. Since the Grindr app has to be open for a location to be traced, this guy also would also had to have his app open and would thus be aware of Eric\u2019s whereabouts, making for a rather awkward situation when neither of them made an effort to speak. <\/p>\n

* When people move to cities, they become more eccentric, more visually individualistic, as a way to distinguish themselves from the throngs of others living there. Such individuality and distinction must occur instantaneously as we walk past each other on the street, thus clothing becomes one of the most efficient ways to do so. Much of conspicuous consumption rests on our relationship to our neighbors and peers and thus city life plays a significant role in how we consume. In a 2006 article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Dartmouth professor Erzo Luttmer found that our neighbors\u2019 wealth inversely affected our well-being. In fact, while living next to rich people makes us unhappy, it\u2019s worse to be friends with them. 47 Thus, in New York City, where making $ 500,000 is \u201cmiddle class,\u201d 48 it\u2019s no surprise that its inhabitants feel the pressure to keep up with their friends who make $ 5 million a year, or to at least appear as though they are on par. In New York City, just like San Francisco, everyone feels poor (even the well-to-do) because the density of the city forces close and frequent contact with others, including those with great wealth. This density puts further pressure on inhabitants to be status-conscious, and reminds them of their social and economic position vis-\u00e0-vis everyone else. In general, cities have this effect on us\u2014 we are both pressured and rewarded by conspicuous, status-oriented consumption. <\/p>\n

* In his book Distinction, the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, wrote about the means by which status was attained across different classes. Bourdieu argued that the working class didn\u2019t simply want what the rich already had, but rather each class\u2019s values reflected their respective social position. In essence, they wanted different things altogether. The working class prized new over vintage or antique, American football rather than tennis, ostentatious weddings rather than small, quiet affairs. 49 To use Max Weber\u2019s term, the rich, middle class, and working class embody and prioritize different \u201cstyles of life.\u201d 50 Consumer behavior becomes one of the key elements in demonstrating status, and thus different cities, with their diverse populations in terms of race, income, industry, and educational levels, have dramatically different consumption patterns. <\/p>\n

* When there are more people around, there is greater pressure to reveal status and also a greater social bump from conspicuous consumption. Because young people likely have fewer obligations in other areas of their lives and enjoy a highly social lifestyle, the younger the population, the greater the level of conspicuous consumption. Given that they provide more opportunities for their clientele to flaunt their status, greater numbers of drinking establishments and restaurants are also associated with conspicuous consumption. <\/p>\n

* When I think about city differences, I am often reminded of a more contemporary, albeit quirky, example\u2014 that of the surfer menorah. As its namesake would suggest, this item is a menorah fashioned with a surfboard placed on the stem between the candelabrum\u2019s branches and its foot. New York University sociologist Harvey Molotch wrote in great detail about its popularity on the beaches of Laguna Niguel in Southern California and the impossibility of selling it anywhere else. It is the hybrid culture specific to Southern California that allows such an item to be ironic (even literal for some) rather than offensive. But such an item only exists as a result of the great beaches that enable surfing and the rise of auto design, which brought lots of new acrylics and materials that allowed surfboards to advance along with a liberal Jewish population. Along with surfboards came the \u201chigh-jinks\u201d surfer culture that inspired the irreverent art scene of the 1960s which influenced the production of that surfer menorah many decades later. The surfing wouldn\u2019t be possible without the beach and the ocean, but those surfboards were a result of materials spawned from aerospace and cars. So the surfer menorah becomes place-specific due to the confluence of artistic materials, culture, and demographics that are found only in the peculiarities of Southern California. <\/p>\n

* By way of anecdote, after moving from New York to California, I found that within five or six years I wore less black, ate more vegetables, learned how to cook quinoa…<\/p>\n

* research that suggests that money can buy happiness up to $ 75,000 annual income… those who were wealthier experienced feelings of accomplishment and being in the right place in their life journey. In other words, possessing financial resources is correlated with satisfaction…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett wrote in 2017: * In the 1920s, Muriel Bristol attended a summer\u2019s afternoon tea party in Cambridge, UK. A number of professors and their spouses were also in attendance. On this particular occasion, the host poured Bristol a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20305],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t